I know its easier than ever to dunk on how terrible reddit has gotten, but honestly? What is this? How is is safer to deliver this content to kids viewing reddit on a tablet or PC or in the app? Why even create the bs excuse?
They could just have easily told the truth an displayed a message like “Content is limited. Open in the app to view.” It’s still a jerk move, but at a minimum its honest.
Maybe nobody actually knows the answer, except probably Reddit devs and the managers that made them push those changes out, neither of which will be at liberty to say.
We can all speculate - they’re doing something for the sake of being seen to be doing something instead of actually blocking the content; they don’t want to block the content selectively because that means KYC and lots of people get upset about that sort of thing, etc etc.